IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network allows users to view all relevant transactions from a single dashboard to quickly pinpoint and assess issues allowing resolution in minutes not hours.
IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business is very well suited for medium to large businesses that have a large commercial / B2B customer set, limited technical resources, and very simple standardized integrations with their B2B customers. It might be less appropriate or a fit for brands that have a much more complex tech stack, smaller commercial customer base, and more complete sales/products or options for their clients.
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
The UI / UX is pretty straightforward. It does take some time to configure fully (everything is customized mapping tailored to your business's needs), but once everything is set up, their solution is incredibly reliable. Once it's fully onboarded, it's a very scalable solution for adding more clients and integrations to your business. Technical support could be better.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
IBM Sterling Supply Chain can be more expensive and complex, and has lower customer and technical service support than some of the other players. Onboarding might be a bit faster with different providers. Other providers might be better for businesses that are still in the earlier stages of their maturity, with regular growth or regular changing business and processes that are not fully established, might find IBM Sterling less of a fit for their operations and integrations.
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
